What is "chaunt"

Usage examples of "chaunt".

The thrush still chaunted, but the swallows fast Hied to their home beneath lone cottage eaves.

Then the bells for matins ring, And the grey friars past it go, Into church in double row, And it hears the chaunts they sing.

Bucket receives the harmonious impeachment so modestly, confessing how that he did once chaunt a little, for the expression of the feelings of his own bosom, and with no presumptuous idea of entertaining his friends, that he is asked to sing.

The shoutings, and the glory, and the woe, One great full chaunt of homage to mine ears,-- And there I wait the while the sacrifice Is slain before me.

In truth, she would have had little of her lover's company, if she had liked the chaunt of the choristers better than the cry of the hounds: yet I know not.

The instinctive act of humankind was to stand and listen, and learn how the trees on the right and the trees on the left wailed or chaunted to each other in the regular antiphonies of a cathedral choir.

A procession of monks passed by chaunting in a sweet and solemn tone, in that language which once awoke the pauses of this Roman air with words of fire.

At length the gates of the monastery were thrown open, and a number of monks came forward in procession, carrying lights, and chaunting hymns.

Four lay-brothers raised the bier, and followed a troop of priests and monks, who went first with the crucifix, chaunting a De profundis.

When you read Lord Dunsany's "The Sack of Emeralds," forget the real world and surrender yourself to his magic as he tells us of "one bad October night in the high wolds, with a north wind chaunting of winter," when an old man, his face hopeless, totters along under the weight of a heavy sack.

Thus all day long the young men worshipped the god with song, hymning him and chaunting the joyous paean, and the god took pleasure in their voices.

During the morning of the fifth day, the 11th of July, I entered, and went moving down, an extraordinary long avenue of snowbergs and floes, most regularly placed, half a mile perhaps across and miles long, like a Titanic double-procession of statues, or the Ming Tombs, but mounting and sinking as to music on the swell, some towering high, throwing placid shadows on the aisle between, many being of a pellucid emerald hue, three or four pouring down water-falls which wawled a far and chaunting sound, the sea of a singular thickness, almost like egg-white, while, as always there, some snowclouds, white and woolly, floated in the pale sky: and down this aisle, which produced a mysterious impression of Cyclopean cathedrals and queer sequesteredness, I had hardly passed a mile, when I sighted a black object at its end.